


Leftovers

by Hyena_Poison



Category: Walking Dead, Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-08
Updated: 2014-07-08
Packaged: 2018-02-07 23:00:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1917246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyena_Poison/pseuds/Hyena_Poison
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re just the leftovers, grabbing broken bits and pieces, taping them together into something that resembles a life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A fill for the [Kinkmeme](http://twd-kinkmeme.livejournal.com/5396.html?thread=7694868#t7694868/%22)
> 
> Just some short things; kind of jumps around in a loose timeline.

Sometimes, she looks for their faces. In the herds, in the stragglers and solitary loners; in the ripped-up piles left on roads and in buildings. Before she smashes a rotten skull, pushes a knife into a dead brain, she makes sure to look. All the filth and decay makes it hard usually, to tell if it’s one of them, if this one means something. There’s no hesitation—dead is dead, and she can do what she needs to when it’s quiet again. And there’s only ever the quiet: nothing is safe and there is no peace.

Her knife slides through the hollow under the jaw, finds the sweet-spot and the walker drops. Hiss of air, thwack, and the last walker’s down with a bolt through the eye. The stillness that follows a flurry; Maggie wipes black gunk off the knife on a dead woman’s blouse, turns to watch a man pop a crossbow bolt from an eye-socket. Cleans the shaft and point with a rag, examining it for damage before sliding it into a leather sling on his back. 

He looks around, to the things on the ground, to her. Bites at his thumb and looks away, says, “Any of them—”

“No,” she says, and he nods, still looking over dead faces. She steps over a corpse to rest a hand on his shoulder, slides her palm down his arm until she finds his fingers, grips them in hers. It’s not a happy smile she gives him; it’s just tired and small and all she can manage. He meets her eyes for a moment, looks away and squeezes her hand before letting go to pick up the red gas-can nearby. She follows and they move off the road and into the pines.


	2. Chapter 2

They’re not the people either of them want to find, but they find each other all the same. It is days after the prison was torn open, after they were scattered like dirt tossed to the wind; feels like months, feels like forever. Less than twelve hours since a walker got its teeth into Sasha’s throat—and she thinks she should be used to that sound, a body trying to pull in air and blood getting in the way, getting everywhere—and Bob lost a piece of his shoulder before she’d gotten to them through the fog, put down the thing chewing on him. He’d stayed with Sasha, but tells Maggie to leave, that this was goodbye. He’d take care of himself, and she wishes she didn’t look back, hadn’t seen him lay close to Sasha’s body, press his lips to her forehead and a gun to his own. 

And those are faces she doesn’t need to look for. 

She walks. 

Rounds a bend in the road, sees something walking toward her. She pauses, raises her gun; it stops too, does the same. They take their time getting closer, until she knows that face, that crossbow and stance. And then he sags, lowering the bow and she’s running the last yards. 

He says barely a thing as they move up the road, find a delivery truck to wait out the night in. She watches him pick at his nails, looks at the blood and dirt and cuts and bruises, black eye and split cheek; certain she doesn’t look any better. She starts then, voice low under the buzz of cicadas and crickets, lists off names of the dead. More silence, more nothing from him, so she pushes, bullies pieces from him. 

He’d seen Glenn get on the buss, hadn’t seen him after. Carl went to help Rick; Michonne got there first but a bullet got Carl and then Michonne was dragging Rick away from the field. Beth, he’d grabbed Beth and they’d made it out, found a house after a few days.

Daryl, where is Beth. He only shakes his head, won’t look Maggie in the eyes. Daryl, is Beth dead. He nods, yeah, and she can’t really feel anything because it’s all hollow now, empty and lukewarm and stretching forever. Daryl, what happened. There were men, a group, and they found the house; two men pinned Daryl down, the others—

He stops, seconds and minutes and it could be hours before Maggie asks what they did to her sister; she knows, deep in that hollowness, but Daryl has to say it. He tries, stops, and finally says, “They took turns. One of’m used a knife. I got loose, but she—there wasn’t…” he goes back to picking at a fingernail and doesn’t continue; draws his knees up to his chest in a mirror of her. 

Maggie manages, “Are they still—” 

“They’re dead,” Daryl does look at her then, holds her eyes and there’s so much there and not enough and she isn’t sure what. Maggie looks away, and they sit in silent avoidance of one another until the sun is up and it’s time to move.


	3. Chapter 3

Can’t skin for shit, that’s what Daryl says anyway and he holds out a hand for the knife when he squats next to her. It’s a smaller rabbit, gives her trouble, but he goes about it like there’s nothing to it; here, cut like this, and he shows her. She moves closer to see his hands work, bumps her thigh against his, arms touching. She feels him tense, and he stumbles over a word before slowly leaning away; she catches him looking sideways at her, his face goes red and he won’t look at her again. 

It takes time, before minor contact no longer makes him flinch. Maggie keeps at, no real motivation; it’s something—not walkers or dead family and friends or the constant moving. She’s getting good at skinning, good enough that he shouldn’t be offering to help and she shouldn’t be accepting. Sometimes they go days without seeing even a walker, and she guesses it’s a comfort; having someone physically there, someone warm and concrete. 

No one else is left. Maggie says this despite the bitter and distant hope that someone, anyone, from their group is still out there. Some days, it’s enough, that hope; it’s enough to keep looking in houses for signs, to walk over a hill and think, today there will be a face she knows. 

They follow the railroad tracks for a while, see the signs. Hope enough to believe that a safe place still exists, hope enough to think that when they get there, people from the group will be there too. The signs are less frequent, someone is tearing them down, marking out the ones too strong to destroy with a skull and crossbones. Danger, poison, bad idea; they decide to listen and turn back. 

They don’t follow the tracks anymore; they move in circles, search and survive, around and around through the woods and little towns. They leave messages where they can, make a circuit to check them, rinse and repeat. It’s cold and they need to find a place good enough to hold them until spring. 

Daryl’s showing her the map, heavy lines and numbers jumbled in with chicken-scratch; the fire is warm but she moves closer to him all the same.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s a balance, remembering and moving on—the two are hard to mix, volatile and irrational and sound and completely needed all the same. And maybe it would be easier if the only person she sees didn’t remind her of everything that’s gone. They’re not the same, not those people in rose-filtered memories, and that hardens the reality of this even more. She remembers, all kinds of little things—Glenn’s skin, the feel of his hair between her fingers, the laugh of a baby, stone halls and voices, her father’s smile—that do her no good now. 

She keeps looking for those people, those memories, in the faces of every monster she kills, every shell she puts down. At her back is Daryl, always, quiet and shut off and she cling to that like she’d drown without him; because he’s the proof, the reminder that everything she had was real, that it was once substance. 

He looks at her, and she knows that sometimes he sees the same thing, understands that she is a testimony of a life before. Mostly, she thinks he sees Beth, sees in her the sister he failed. 

Pressed chest-to-chest on a mattress courtesy of the latest bolt-hole, she feels him shift in his sleep. It’s cold, and at first, the closeness is a necessity—warmth, hiding, safety; somewhere in the dark and ice it changes, became something more willing than simple survival. 

After the first winter, they stop talking in ‘whens’, starting using ‘ifs’; by the end of that summer, they stop saying either.


	5. Chapter 5

Not much of a discussion happens between them; it’s never talked over, no attempts are made to explain it or make sense of it. It just is what it is for them. With time comes trust, and Maggie guesses that it came natural—you protect someone, eat with them, sleep beside them, feelings get involved. She couldn’t give the time or place when things shift, doesn’t remember when Daryl isn’t just Daryl anymore. There are things she attaches to him now, ideas and truths, none of which she wants to question now. 

Gradually, she would say, like a slight incline over miles until suddenly she’s standing on the edge of something. Gradual, and uncertain; it’s hard to think of Daryl as shy, as unsure, but in this he is. There were so many almosts, so many maybes and she wasn’t sure he really understood what she was attempting. And one night, eating some kind of forest creature by the fire, she feels a hand on hers. His face is bright red and he doesn’t look back at her; but they sit for most of the night, fingers twisted together until the fire dies. 

They don’t say anything about it, and when it happens again—when he finds her hand or she moves for his—they don’t bring it up. Neither of them has the words for this, for what happens in the aftershock of loss, for what comes out of it. Little things tell them more than any promise or speech; the way he moves to be closer to her, how she sings to him sometimes when he’s lying against her. 

And she’s in awe, when she stops and everything is quiet for her and she can think. Like a forest after a wildfire, new green things poking up through the char and ash.


	6. Chapter 6

Sometimes, when he runs his fingers over her, she wonders if he’s tracing the path a knife made over different skin. He gets quiet, draws away from her and she can’t help but leave him to it; she’s tried to talk about it, but it gets them nowhere, is nothing but digging at half-healed scabs. 

Sometimes, when he holds her hand, he runs a finger over the wedding ring Maggie still wears. She asked, half afraid of the answer she’ll get, if he wants her to take it off. He stares at her, lets go of her hand and walks away. She moves to follow but he’s in her face before she can open her mouth, and it takes a moment to realize he’s angry—at her, at everything. Why the fuck would you ask that, he growls, why the fuck would you even ask. And he doesn’t wait for a reply, disappears into the trees and leaves her standing alone. 

Before the sun is up, he reappears with a heaviness on him that Maggie wishes she could smooth from his shoulders. Daryl won’t look at her, just sits down near her, knees up and scrubs a hand over his face. There’s pink in the sky before he slips his fingers through hers, thumbs the rings and says, “Leave it”. He squeezes her hand, shifting so she can scoot over and tuck an arm around his waist. He pulls her closer, rests his head against hers. 

She loves Glenn, every day, all these weeks and months she has never thought to stop. It’s easy to forget that there are others, people that care for him too, people that also lost him. She looks at the ring, just metal and stone and yet something so incredibly more; it stands for something, a token from a person that is so far from them now, of an entire world that crumbled. And they’re just the leftovers, grabbing broken bits and pieces, taping them together into something that resembles a life. 

They sit there, stiff and bunched together until the sun in high above them.


End file.
